The Hair Tie

One –

If it had snapped – the way those cheaply-made hair ties usually do, in that weak spot where they are joined together – it would have rested as a thin, black ‘S’ in the cracked pavement. It didn’t, though. It slid out of her lanky, slippery hair, bounced off her tote bag, and landed gently in a crevice between a back tire and a faded white line demarcating her parking space. A white line that would be paved over and repainted a fresh, neon white by the next afternoon. Underneath which the hair tie would remain.

She ran her short fingers through her hair, tossed the tote bag onto the back seat, and blurted, “Shit.” Sitting in the driver’s seat, she reopened the car door, scanned the ground and her lap for the lost hair tie, then hastily fluffed her hair in the rearview mirror with a shrug. As she backed out of the spot, her tire rolled over the round hair tie, leaving a tattoo of road dust and flattening it further into the crevice.

She drove away.

Two –

The neon white faded to a dullish grey, speckled haphazardly with dots of tar and smears of grease, through which a long cleft narrowed, then suddenly closed. The hair tie, now with frayed – almost disjointed – ends, peeked up through the gap, surrounded by dead leaves and blackened snow, promptly melting in the unseasonably warm spring heat.

The little girl picked it up and absently stuffed it in her back pocket.

“What is that? Where did that come from?” her mother scolded later that afternoon as the little girl wrapped it twice, then three times, around her little finger. “That could have lice on it! Give me that,” the mother alarmed as she grabbed and flung the hair tie over the picnic table and back into the parking lot.

The little girl shrugged and continued eating her sandwich, not knowing or caring what lice were.

Three –

The crumbling pile of asphalt rubble lay quietly in the still of a weighty and windless air. Beneath that motionless top layer, powdered with the dust of destruction, the hair tie is nestled. With one last elastic fiber holding its rounded shape, it sinks easily into the widened crevice. Oblivious to ruin, it waits. It remains.

But there is no one to stumble upon it. No one to carefully pick it up, roll it back and forth in a winter-dry palm, and vaguely wonder how long it’s been hidden. It will wait a long time yet, while the atmosphere slowly thickens, and pushes it further underground, everything simultaneously collapsing into itself in a heap of coagulated, compact mass.

Meanwhile, there is no one left to care.